miles from a real town, practically on the edge of Death Valley. The gas gauge looked from here as though the tank was barely above empty. He hoped it was just the angle making the gauge look that way. He wasn’t facing it head-on like Hobart was in the driver’s seat.
Of course, somebody would come along and help if they ran out of gas-there wasn’t much solitude on Route 15 today-but that would make their beautiful alibi problematical: There would be somebody who had seen the two of them stalled on the road from Los Angeles to Las Vegas at the wrong time. If they stopped, they were vulnerable. And there was two hundred thousand dollars in cash in the trunk. It wasn’t that people didn’t drive into Las Vegas with two hundred thousand in cash every day, it was that a pair of shitheels in a six-year-old Hyundai didn’t. If anything happened to separate them from the endless, anonymous current of traffic-if they had to get out to push the car to the shoulder and sit there with it while everybody stared at them in pity-then they would probably find themselves talking to a tow-truck driver or a cop. It wasn’t fair. This should have been simple.
At first everything had been quick and easy. He and Hobart had been working together for about a year, and they were sure of each other. There was no indecision when they saw Philip Kramer come out of the house after the meeting. Hobart said, “We’ll take him in his car so we don’t have a body lying on the ground that we have to drag out of sight. Go find a place with a clear shot at the left side of his car.”
That was not as easy as it sounded. A parked car has to be stopped with its right side to the curb and its left to the street. That didn’t suggest a lot of hiding places. But Tim knew that Hobart never spoke idly, and not doing what he said was the same to Hobart as refusing to do it.
Tim Whitley ran down the street toward the place where Phil Kramer had left his Toyota sedan, and searched. The only hiding place he could find to the left of Kramer’s car was inside the van parked across the street. Tim was a car thief, and he had his slim-jim with him. By the time Kramer came up the dark street, Tim Whitley was crouched down in the back of the van right behind the driver’s seat. When Kramer’s door opened, Tim heard it. He went to the window of the van and fired.
Tim felt good about it. It wasn’t Hobart this time, with Tim only there to steal a car to use in the job and drive away afterward. This time Tim was the shooter. Hobart’s only part in the job had been to walk up the street behind Kramer to keep him preoccupied and under the impression that he knew what to be afraid of.
Tim Whitley sensed a change in Hobart, who was shifting in his seat, trying to see around the car ahead. “What do you see?”
“Cars are getting off up there.”
“That’s probably good, isn’t it?” Whitley said. “We’ve finally come to what’s holding up the traffic. It’s got to be an accident. Once we get past that, we’ll be home-free.” He kept watching Hobart for a reaction.
“I don’t see an accident. They’re just getting off. Like a detour.”
Tim could see it now, too. There was an exit ramp far ahead, and cars were moving to the right to take it-not a huge stream of cars, but maybe one in ten. They climbed to a narrow road above, turned left to cross an overpass, and drove off somewhere to the left and away into the rocky hills.
He knew that Hobart was going to take that road, just from looking at his face. Nine out of ten drivers were staying on the interstate, but the one-tenth that were willing to veer off onto a road that was only two lanes at its widest would surely include Hobart. He had the peculiar, rare quality of absolute confidence in himself and depthless contempt for everybody else.
Hobart took the exit ramp and accelerated up the incline to the other road. He stopped only for an instant, not because he had to look to the right-nobody was coming from that direction, nor had there been since Whitley had first seen the exit-but just to look at the desert from up here.
“Jerry?”
“What?”
“Do you happen to know where this goes?”
“No. But you can get anywhere from anywhere else, if you’re moving. Those people back there aren’t.”
Tim knew it wasn’t a good idea to ask anything else for the moment. He knew that it wasn’t manly to keep expressing uncertainty, to keep demanding information that he had not earned by waiting and seeing. He did not want to squander the precious respect he had gained by taking Phil Kramer with one shot from the van. Doing that had shown he was calm and unafraid.
Still, Tim wanted to voice the concern he had that this might be a road that didn’t go where Hobart imagined. He recalled hearing there was one road off Interstate 15 that people took to drive up and around to come out on the north side of the Grand Canyon, the side where there were practically no people. And he knew there was another exit that took you north into Death Valley.
Tim went back to fiddling idly with the radio tuner. It was a fake activity now, and he was just doing it to change the number on the digital indicator, to keep Hobart thinking he was doing a job, like the sonar man in a submarine movie where everybody stood around sweating while he listened for enemy ships. The radio should be picking up something intelligible, but it wasn’t working right.
Hobart kept driving up the road between the dry, rocky hills. As the minutes passed and personalities reasserted themselves, the distances between the cars that had left the traffic jam lengthened. There were some drivers who just stomped on the gas pedal and tore through the desert as though the jam were chasing them. Others seemed to wonder if they had made the wrong decision to leave the only major highway in the desert and drive off hoping that the new road would magically take them to Vegas, where they wanted to be. They went slowly, looking back at the interstate as long as they could, hoping to see some improvement so they could go back.
Hobart flashed past a dozen of these cars and kept going for a half hour before Tim Whitley began to feel that he was going to have to speak. He considered various things he could say, but rejected each of them. Any reference to the time that had passed, the distance, or the traffic might sound like whining, and Hobart didn’t respect whining. He had already foreclosed any talk about their destination. Hobart had said he didn’t know where the road led, but seemed to think he could take it to Las Vegas even if it didn’t go there.
Whitley let the miles slip past. As he looked out at the rock shapes and colors and the brightness, he conceded that the desert was beautiful. But it was beautiful in the same way the ocean was, in a hostile, treacherous way. If the boat were to spring a leak or the car to break down, the scenery would not be just a sight anymore, but a vast harshness. One was deadly cold and the other was deadly hot, and they were both too enormous for a person to slight in this thoughtless way. It was almost bad luck not to give the desert the fear it deserved.
He felt the car’s engine stop racing. In the new silence, Hobart whispered, “Shit.” Whitley could see his arm muscles straining as the car coasted. The power steering had cut off, and each adjustment Hobart made to the front wheels meant fighting the dead mechanism. He aimed the car at the shoulder of the road, brought it onto the gravel, and stopped. A second later, the cloud of dust they had kicked up drifted over the car and away.
Tim knew they were out of gas, but he had to say it anyway. “Out of gas?”
“Uh-huh.” Hobart turned to look into Whitley’s eyes.
“What are we going to do?”
“Walk to get some gas.”
Tim Whitley turned and looked back at the long, empty road behind them, a thinning black surface that dissolved into shining pools of mirage water in the relentless sunshine. He tried to calculate. They had been driving for about a half hour. No, more. It was at least fortyfive minutes. He didn’t know how fast Hobart had been driving, but it had to be at least sixty miles an hour. That was a mile a minute. “We can’t walk back that far. It’s more than forty miles.”
Hobart said, “No, we can’t. We go in the other direction. There’s a town up ahead.”
“How do you know?”
“I happened to see it on a map. I think it was on the place mat in that diner in Baker. I know the road goes north this far. To the left is Death Valley, and the road swings off to the right to where the town is. We’ll buy a three-gallon can of gas and pay somebody to drive us back here with it.”
“Do you happen to know how far it is?”
“Well, if you walk on the road, it could be ten miles, but the road hooks to the right, so we can take a shortcut across country and meet it. I’d guess it would be four miles that way, maybe even two.”
“Jesus, Jerry,” said Tim. “Walk across the open desert like that?” The car’s air conditioning had cut off with the engine, so the windows were heating the enclosed space like a greenhouse. “It must be over a hundred out
